Thwocks and Whispers

"Mellow" might have been recorded in a shipyard: augmenting Jack
Hersca's nagging if fetching guitar and Gene Lake's steady if seething
drums is a rhythm element that suggests a boat whistle heard across
a moonless harbor. Tricky's vocal is whispered as usual, and
although he claims She makes him want to move, movement seems a
distant memory for this chap, who's clearly wounded or gravely ill.
Next track, the artist makes his pop bid with a catchy femme-chorus
refrain--"Those men will brake [sic] your bones/Don't know how to
build stable homes"--and a guest star: PJ Harvey, what a draw! And
for another three songs or so, a decent level of musical amenity is
maintained: Martina's crooning tale of woe underpinned by low-register
guitar/keyb riffs of unspecified origin and Calvin
Weston's free drumming, three-note distorto hook beneath Tricky's
own speed-mumble, xylophonish tinkle countered by a keyb belch like
an engine that won't catch. After that, though, it's time to face
facts. Angels With Dirty Faces is no fun at all.

Well, what did anyone expect? The Spice Girls? The Sneaker
Pimps? Just a miracle, that's all. Tricky (not to mention the
Sneaker Pimps) wouldn't be making albums, at least in America,
if he hadn't consummated a miracle. Listening back to Maxinquaye in
the wake of Nearly God, Pre-Millennium Tension, and Angels
With Dirty Faces, what stands out isn't the dolor pop generalists
noticed at the time, but the listenability that induced them to
bother: Martina's pervasive lyricism, beats that are buoyant at any
speed, a profusion of sweet-tempered keyb effects that signify
melody, harmony, strings. It's still pretty morose, sure. But
nothing in its bitter passivity and contained rage comes off as a
defeat or a sham. Albert Murray's disquisition on Stomping the
Blues puts it this way: "The main thing, whatever the form, is
resistance if not hostility. Because the whole point is not to give
in and let them get you down. Nor is a flamboyant display of
militant determination necessarily more effective than is cool
resolution. Sometimes a carefully controlled frown or even the
faintest of supercilious smiles will work as much havoc as a scream
or a shout." Maxinquaye had that kind of cool. With blues
replications per se having worn out their formal gris-gris, it
voiced and embraced a grim new resignation about freedom, power,
race, and human connection in the postwelfare state--and
simultaneously counteracted it.

Although Tricky likes to downplay his links to the Wild Bunch,
the clearest way to map his sonic coordinates is by conceiving
Massive Attack as an axis from which to measure Soul II Soul on one
side and Tricky on the other. Soul II Soul's Nellee Hooper produced
Protection for Massive Attack, yet Protection presaged
Maxinquaye anyway, and not just because Tricky's "Karmacoma" was
the act's catchiest and spookiest song ever. Each thick-textured,
clean-etched track checking in with its own subtle beat, Protection is
trip hop without pain or mess, doing a solid for vocalists in need
and stretching instrumentals into a comfort zone just a little too
unusual for the funk-lite hedonists Soul II Soul was then servicing
so warmly. Maxinquaye gave Protection's pleasures an edge--made
them artistically respectable, you might say--with acerbic reality
checks, disgruntled digressions, and the ever-present danger that
the pieces weren't going to fit together in the end, or even right
now. It was like Godard remaking Breathless with a LePen angle and
the good guys not dying; it was like walking into a motel bar after
blowing a rod and the trio is playing Bird and "Misterioso." In
Tricky's mind, I'm sure, the antisocial stuff was the point; he was
only disarming or catchy because he'd gotten into the habit on his
old job. But this compromise-as-synthesis sold him to nitpickers
everywhere--everyone who found Jazzie B and Trent Reznor equally
simple-minded.

Maxinquaye was best contemplated in solitude, or in the
reflective late-night of a silent thruway journey or bedtime wind-down.
Yet it also made suitable dinner music, especially for folks
who don't bat an eye when you fuck them in the ass just for a
laugh. Tricky has battled rancorously to avoid this trap ever
since. Because his critical supporters were arty hip hoppers,
doom-friendly dance-trancers, and adepts of postpunk abrasion, none of
whom had run out of warm things to say about Maxinquaye, you would
hardly have known what a departure Pre-Millennium Tension was, much
less how often the Nearly God multi-artist project achieved the
stasis true Tricky albums only play with. But Angels With Dirty
Faces establishes what might have been an experiment as an m.o.
There are changes to be sure. No matter how short it may be on what
you'd call songs, this is a rock album, with a shifting live band
on every track even if the booklet fails to account for all the
corresponding sounds. There are almost no
credited samples, a show of artistic autonomy precisely as
honorable as that of Tricky's royalty-conscious predecessors Luke
Campbell and Hammer. Be all that as it may, however, Angels With
Dirty Faces sounds a lot more like Pre-Millennium Tension than
Pre-Millennium Tension does like Maxinquaye. Rather than
stomping the
blues, it tries to nickel-and-dime them to death. It's not fun, and
wouldn't make any sense if it was. But that doesn't mean you won't
wonder what you'll hear next, and find solace in your curiosity.

So it's back to that shipyard, or someplace like it. The title
track defines the album: Tricky whispering (when he singsongs it's
a relief) and Martina dreaming out loud--"Angels with dirty
faces/Disappear without traces"--over background music for a scary
walk through a desolate cityscape, maybe out near the Gowanus Canal
where the mob does its hits, any flow frayed irreparably by the
pops, thwocks, fractured klaxons, and random screeches of
percussion from nowhere. The residue of grimy technologies is all
over the record as it settles into a state of permanent low-level
disorder: foghorns lowing, brakes complaining, clocks sounding
across windswept nights, locomotives struggling uphill. On "Tear Out My Eyes,"
it really is as if Tricky is ready to die, arguably in the role of
Kurt Cobain (or Jimi Hendrix)--there's a Seattle reference before
"Wanna take my clothes off/Tear my mouth and nose off and take out
my eyes." Toward the end things do get faster and angrier. But
since the invective, if that's what you want to call the barely
articulated likes of "Why the fuck do they keep making those guns?"
and "You trample on my soul," is directed primarily at the music
business, big deal.

"I don't like this century," Tricky mutters in the course of
"Record Companies," and that sums up his worldview as eloquently as
words ever will. It's the sounds that signify, and postindustrially
premillennial though Tricky's may be, they're also original,
strong, and to the point. He distinguishes himself from the run of
noise sculptors just by remaining conducive to recognizable life.
He's a hater not a fighter, and the devil is in his details. So
give that man a set of horns--he's earned them.